Helen Fielding is an English novelist and screenwriter, probably best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, a sequence of novels and films that chronicle the life of a ‘thirtysomething’ singleton in London as she tries to make sense of life and love.
Helen was born on 19th February 1958 and grew up in West Yorkshire with her sister and two brothers. She studied English at Oxford and began working with the BBC in 1979 as a regional researcher on the news magazine Nationwide and produced a live satellite broadcast from a refugee camp in Eastern Sudan for Comic Relief. Helen now spends her time either in London or Los Angeles and has two children by Kevin Curran, a writer and producer on The Simpsons, although they no longer live together.
Helen has been nominated and gained a number of awards including:
1997 British Book of the Year
2002 Writers Guild of America nomination for Best Screenplay
2002 BAFTA nomination for Best Screenplay
2002 Evening Standard Award Best Screenplay.
2013 Nomination for National Book Awards
Bridget Jones’s Diary 1996
This book was written in the form of a personal diary and won the 1998 British Book of the Year. Bridget not only obsesses about her love life, but also details her various daily struggles with her weight, her over-indulgence in alcohol and cigarettes, and her career. Bridget’s friends and family are the supporting characters in her diary. These friends are there for her unconditionally throughout the novel; they give her advice about her relationships, and support when problems arise. Bridget is often plagued with that perennial question “How’s your love life?”
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 1998
This was a sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary. It chronicles Bridget Jones’s adventures after she begins to suspect that her boyfriend, Mark Darcy, is falling for a rich young solicitor, Rebecca, who works in the same firm as him. The comic novel follows the characteristic ups and downs of the self-proclaimed singleton’s first real relationship in several years. It also involves many misunderstandings, a few work mishaps, and an adventure in Southeast Asia involving planted drugs and Madonna songs.
Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy 2013
Fourteen years after landing Mark Darcy, Bridget’s life has taken her places she never expected, but despite the new challenges of single parenting, online dating, wildly morphing dress sizes and bafflingly complex remote controls, she is the same irrepressible and endearing soul we all remember—though her talent for embarrassing herself in hilarious ways has become dangerously amplified now that she has 752 Twitter followers. As Bridget navigates head lice epidemics, school-picnic humiliations and cross-generational sex, she learns that life isn’t over when you start needing reading glasses—and why one should never, ever text while drunk. This book is studded with witty observations about the perils and absurdities of our times and is both outrageously comic and genuinely moving. As we watch her dealing with heartbreaking loss and rediscovering love and joy, Bridget invites us to fall for her all over again.